Wellness, page 48
So obviously he doesn’t appreciate Facebook trying to drag him back to that place.
“Don’t forget where you came from” was the only advice he ever got from anyone back home once word spread that he was leaving town—that he was going to college, in the city, for art. They all assumed that in Chicago he would become one of those pretentious urbanites, those insular city folk who turn up their noses at places like the Flint Hills. They told him not to “put on airs,” is how they said it. They told him not to pretend he wasn’t one of them.
How could they not understand that he had never felt like one of them? For so many years, they had treated him like a reject, and now here they were, telling him the worst thing he could do was reject them back.
So he made it pretty clear to the people back home that he was going to Chicago to absolutely forget where he came from. And in 1992, you could do that: just untether yourself and go to a new place and become a new person, a kind of dramatic bridge-burning that’s quite a lot harder in the age of Facebook, he thinks, where all the people of your vast network compel you—softly, but powerfully—to continue being exactly who they’ve always believed you to be.
And so anytime anyone from Kansas finds Jack on Facebook, he immediately, reflexively, dismisses them. There is a big wall around his past, unbreached until that day his father sent a friend request, which Jack eventually accepted, but with conditions: that Jack restrict his father from seeing any information whatsoever about him, and that Jack restrict his friends from seeing anything his father says or does. Thus Lawrence is digitally quarantined, hidden from everyone in Jack’s life, even Toby, even Elizabeth. And the relationship persists in this lopsided, guarded, highly nonreciprocal manner for many months, with Lawrence sending regular sheepish and supplicatory messages and Jack occasionally responding to them a few days later in a clipped and cold and distant manner. And honestly this feels just delicious to Jack, just so beautifully symmetrical, as if the arc of the universe has bent toward this small personal justice, Jack now able to do to his father exactly what his father did to him, which is to ignore him when he’s most in need. To let him stew in an obviously lonely personal hell and not offer one bit of tenderness or aid. Jack is not exactly proud of this feeling, and he understands he’s not being the compassionate, empathetic, forgiving person that, for example, he’s trying to teach his own son to be—but it just feels so good, revenge. It’s the only kind of cruelty that can make you feel like a bigger and better person for inflicting it. It’s like Jack is teaching his father an important kind of lesson, the lesson being, basically: Now you know how it feels.
And so they continue like this for quite a long time, Jack withholding any real intimacy out of a mistaken belief that Lawrence is on Facebook only to connect with him, when in fact Lawrence has found strong and robust connections and support and community and fellowship in the many Facebook groups where he is now practically famous for the depth of his concern and the frequency of his posts, which Jack knows nothing about until one day in mid-2012 when, seemingly out of nowhere, Lawrence posts a long and involved diatribe on his public Facebook feed imploring all of his friends to make their peace with God and let go of earthly grudges and live life as fully and freely as possible because this is the year, 2012, that, as everyone knows, the world is going to end.
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The Deep Learning Artificial Neural Network
As far as Jack can tell, it has something to do with the Mayan calendar, and how ancient Mayan measurements regarding the forward movement of time showed an abrupt conclusion at a particular fixed point in the distant future, a point where time stops and history ends and the world is unmade, and this point, when translated into our modern Gregorian calendar, turns out to be 21 December 2012. And on that day, the day that the calendar ends, the final day of some fundamental five-thousand-year planetary cycle—a Friday—something cosmically bad will happen, and what this is, exactly, is unclear, but Lawrence has ideas. Stuff about galactic alignments and solar precessions and the reversal of the planet’s geomagnetic poles and the twisting off of its outer crust and the collision of Earth with a mysterious Planet X, whose gravity we have apparently detected but whose location remains elusive, and that’s probably because it’s hidden by a massive black hole now swooping into the Milky Way after millennia abroad to intercept us and shred us to atomic bits.
Or something like that. Frankly it’s a grab bag of astronomical lunacy, and it makes Jack feel embarrassed for his father, embarrassed on his father’s behalf.
Dad, what is this? he asks in a private message.
Just something I found on Facebook.
Do you believe it?
I think it’s interesting.
But do you believe it?
There’s nothing wrong with being prepared, right?
Okay, but do you actually believe this stuff?
I believe in having an open mind.
Okay, but seriously?
Jack, listen, you seem to me like you’re still really angry about everything that happened. Maybe the end of the world is a good reminder to FORGIVE, before it’s too late.
Do you really BELIEVE that the world is going to END THIS YEAR???
It’s just a joke, Jack. Relax.
But then Lawrence keeps posting about it as if it’s not a joke, keeps sharing links with his full friend network about, for example, a certain pattern in the sun’s life cycle whereby every few thousand years it goes sort of crazy and ejects humongous solar flares that bathe the planet in cosmic radiation and supercharged particles, a deadly radioactive storm the Mayans actually lived through and witnessed firsthand, which we know because of these recently uncovered evocative glyphs carved into the walls of this one building in Tikal. And so Jack goes to the websites of NASA and the National Science Foundation and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and the U.S. Geological Survey and finds pages insisting that there is no such solar cycle, and there is no collision imminent with any planet-sized object, and there is no black hole anywhere near Earth’s orbit, and there is definitely no way Earth’s crust can up and twist off, and Jack sends all of these links to his father, and his father responds—only a few minutes later, frankly not nearly enough time to have fully read and digested all of the scientific literature that Jack sent his way—saying: If the scientists know the world is going to end, do you really think they’d admit it publicly?
But Dad, the world is not going to end.
That’s exactly what they’d say if the world was ending.
Which makes for a kind of airtight, unfalsifiable theory whereby evidence against the conspiracy becomes, weirdly, evidence for the conspiracy. And so Jack just shuts his mouth and waits patiently for 21 December 2012, and when the world does not, in fact, end, he sends his father a triumphant I-told-you-so message, and Lawrence responds with links to new Facebook groups insisting that the whole 2012 Mayan apocalypse story was actually created by the government and leaked to the public as a false flag operation to distract us from what is really going on, and Jack, who actually thought that once the world did not end on the twenty-first of December his father would finally rationally see the error of his ways and moderate his reading habits, is appalled by this new twist, and not only because of the even greater lunacy of this new conspiracy but also because his father’s writing about it feels increasingly unhinged and disturbed, full of gaps and leaps and contradictions and semantic paradoxes (a sad lie if true!!! being one of Lawrence’s many difficult-to-parse utterances). Also appalling is the fact that his father seems to sincerely believe all of it. Despite consistent private denials in which Lawrence will tell Jack it’s all just a joke and that he’s just trying to rile people up and get a laugh and maybe Jack should try being a little less sensitive, publicly it does not seem like a joke, not one bit. It’s hard to square Lawrence’s private denials with his broadcasted behavior, where he consistently posts about how the Mayan calendar story was a cover-up created by the CIA to distract us from the government’s imminent plan to declare martial law and massacre millions of Americans, a plot that anonymous internet sleuths uncovered after photographing a cache of plastic coffins stacked poignantly outside a CDC warehouse in Atlanta. And this sends Jack down his own Facebook rabbit holes, into groups dedicated to mocking or debunking conspiracy theories, after which he sends this evidence to his father, and Lawrence sends very odd kinds of “evidence” back, and it becomes a kind of endless angry pendulum between them, and this dynamic is, for the Facebook Neural Network mediating the whole thing, really excellent.
By 2012, Facebook’s old EdgeRank algorithm is about as technologically relevant as a Studebaker and is being replaced by a state-of-the-art, fully optimized machine-learning neural network designed to maximize user engagement and leverage that engagement to drive monetization. Because the most significant thing to happen to both Lawrence and Jack in 2012 is not the Mayan apocalypse but rather that the Facebook corporation goes public, that it becomes a publicly traded company on Nasdaq, and after a pretty embarrassing IPO in which the stock’s value drops like 50 percent in just one quarter, a decree comes down from the board of directors and the major shareholders to increase revenue significantly, immediately. And this is when the Facebook algorithm fundamentally evolves: whereas EdgeRank attempted to deliver to Lawrence more of what he desired, this new neural network attempts to deliver more of what Facebook desires—namely, content that makes its users stay on Facebook longer, to engage with the platform more, thereby driving more ad revenue. And so this neural network goes to work, its input being Lawrence Baker’s full user-profile data, its output being Lawrence Baker’s net annual worth to the company, and between input and output is a deep hidden layer of millions of individual neurons and nodes that are all constantly watching and testing and filtering and predicting and learning and tweaking in a grand synchronous effort to make that output number much, much bigger.
Because at this moment, at the end of 2012, Lawrence Baker produces only five dollars and sixty-five cents per year for Facebook, which is not excellent at all.
The neural network operates in a recursive, self-correcting manner, each of its nodes nudging and pushing in aggressive exploratory ways—sending group invitations and advertisements and surveys and notices of friend activity and requests to verify photo tags and any of a hundred kinds of alerts and notifications—and if a user does indeed engage with a specific notification, then that node’s strength is enhanced, and if a user does not engage, then that node is inhibited, and in this way the algorithm discovers, through trial and error on a titanic scale, exactly which upstream variables tend to produce downstream results. It’s a tuning process that literally never ends, because even after it finds, for example, that Lawrence is highly engaged by Mayan apocalypse–related content, the algorithm does not know if his engagement is yet maximized. Or, in other words, maybe there’s another kind of content that might engage him even more. And so it goes about a kind of continuous A/B testing, lightly prodding him with invitations to engage with innumerable new content items, these invitations appearing as bright red notifications that grab his attention every time he logs on. The algorithm does not know or care what the actual content of the invitation is, merely whether Lawrence engages with it. And Lawrence, of course, does not know any of this is happening. It just seems to him, based on what he’s lately seeing on Facebook, that the world is going to hell in a fucking handbasket.
It seems clear to Lawrence that the country is way more dangerous and way more scary than it has ever been before, filled with threats from sickness and disaster and plague, a lawless country now infiltrated by terrorists and socialists and gangs, with robber-baron corporate masterminds pulling all the strings, with cabals of media and government elites pursuing deadly new world orders, releasing microbes and viruses and diseases upon unsuspecting populations, selling them unnecessary pills and medicines, covering up the amazing all-natural effectiveness of homeopathic alternatives—stuff like colloidal silver, turmeric, shark cartilage, blue scorpion venom, cumin, apricot pits, electromagnetic waves—in order to keep people sick and needy and, therefore, compliant, passive, on the dole. He shares all of this information with his network—any new threatening thing that comes across his transom, he clicks “Share,” which seems like just his basic civic duty, to warn people. But he finds that every time he shares details of some new threat, he gets a quick and pompous message from Jack telling him to stop it, and he tells Jack that he absolutely won’t stop it because people have a right to know what’s going on, and Jack sends him links to websites that allegedly disprove these theories, and Lawrence sends Jack links about how these sources are the very liars responsible for the cover-up, and Jack sends Lawrence information about “confirmation bias” and insists that Lawrence is seeing threats simply because he wants to see threats, whereby Lawrence sends Jack links to websites about “normalcy bias” and insists that Jack doesn’t see the threats because he’s afraid to see them, and the two of them go back and forth about which of their brains is functioning incorrectly, the tone of the messages growing more exasperated and angry until one day Jack writes: I’m so embarrassed to be related to you.
Which is really excellent!
Never before in their long user history have Lawrence and Jack Baker ever engaged with the platform quite this much. And after months of tuning and learning and self-correcting, the neural network has discovered that the thing that keeps Jack most engaged is Lawrence, and the thing that keeps Lawrence most engaged is terror. And so the algorithm, in a completely automatic and impartial and content-neutral way, becomes a machine that turns terror into money.
Lawrence, of course, does not know that he is being exposed daily to the most terrifying things available on the internet, nor does he know that the internet itself is actually a pretty great optimizing instrument for terrifying things, as the whole process of virality and the method by which things go viral guarantees that the very most terrifying and emotionally affecting and totally unignorable content will always be identified and exposed and promoted as a matter of course, in a more or less mechanical and unstoppable way. He doesn’t understand that the friendly-looking place where he sees photographs of his neighbors’ adorable children and pets is also maybe the most sophisticated fear engine ever created. He just thinks it’s the normal news.
And Jack does not understand that the more angry he gets at his father, the more anger-provoking things the algorithm shows him, sometimes even pulling something from the archives that Jack might have missed the first time around, something Lawrence posted weeks ago that Jack didn’t respond to at the time, showing this to him again and Jack not even realizing it’s old news until he’s halfway done composing his furious response.
And the two of them keep going around and around like this, Jack unable to understand why his father believes these incredible things, Lawrence unable to understand why his son does not, interacting with each other so angrily and so frequently that by the time the Ebola panic sets in around mid-2014, both Lawrence and Jack Baker are worth more than fifty dollars each to Facebook, a growth rate of roughly 1,000 percent year over year, which is pretty excellent indeed.
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The Screen Interaction Algorithm
Both of them, privately, wish it were otherwise. Neither of them particularly wants to be fighting with the other, and both Jack and Lawrence believe that if the other could just stop being so disagreeable and blockheaded, everything would be fine, and they could go back to their more civil—if guarded—peace. In fact every morning for two weeks Lawrence sits down at his computer intending to write Jack a heartfelt and semi-conciliatory message about how he’s sorry their relationship has grown so sour and combative, and how he’d hoped it would turn out so differently, and how he only ever reconnected with Jack in order to apologize for what he now understands was pretty unfair and neglectful treatment, years ago. It’s a long and difficult letter he never actually brings himself to write because as soon as he logs on to Facebook, there’s some bright red new notification, and there’s something terrifying right there at the top of his newsfeed, something that snags his attention and then suddenly he’s clicking and commenting and sharing and an entire morning can dissolve in this manner. He’ll often blink up from the computer sometime in midafternoon when he realizes he’s forgotten to eat breakfast and remembers that his project for the day was to write Jack an ambitious letter but finds that he no longer has the will, today, to do it, and so he puts it off until tomorrow and continues his furious scrolling, figuring that it’s probably best not to write Jack a peace-seeking letter when Lawrence is feeling so jacked up and on edge and unpeaceful himself, on the inside.
